[Bro-Dev] Moving to GitHub?

[Robin Sommer]

This has been coming up in various contexts & subgroups of people, and
I wanted to send it out as a proposal to gather some broader feedback:
Do we want to move Bro's git repositories and tickets to GitHub?

Currently we're hosting our Git repositories on our own server at
git.bro.org; from there, we mirror them to GitHub. For issue tracking,
we use JIRA at tracker.bro.org. Much of all this is a legacy setup in
some sense. I believe it would simplify life for both users &
developers if we moved to GitHub as the authoratative place for both
code and tickets.

More specifically, I propose that we:

     1. Turn the current git repository mirrors on github.com/bro into
        authoritative source for all Bro code. Then we discontinue
        git.bro.org. We can set up up some notification system there
        instead that points people still using the old URLs to GitHub.

     2. Switch to using GitHub as our primary issue tracker. Giving
        the large amount of old tickets in JIRA, I think we should
        just start from scratch there, porting over just the most
        recent pending tickets. We'd keep the JIRA running in
        read-only mode so that we don't loose the history and can
        always refer back to old tickets.

     3. Switch to a mostly PR-based development model (i.e., no more
        merge requests tracked separately through tickets), and also
        use GitHub for code review & feedback.

     4. Make sure it all integrates nicely with Travis CI (which has
        already been set up recently).

About the only downside I see is that emailing out our standard commit
notifications won't be quite as smooth anymore: we'd still get them,
but with a bit of delay as some system would need to be polling for
changes, rather than being triggered immediately. Not much of a
problem I think (and with some additional work, we could make them
push-triggered, too; but probably not worth it).

What do people think? Any support, or concerns?

Robin

-- 
Robin Sommer * ICSI/LBNL * robin at icir.org * www.icir.org/robin